“V” for Vladimir

May 9th, when Russians celebrate the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, is the country’s only true national holiday—a day to remember the collective suffering and achievement of the Second World War, which is the closest thing that post-Soviet Russia has to a foundational unifying story. The wartime losses were enormous, with more than twenty million dead, and each Russian family was touched, in some way, by the conflict. The memory of the Second World War may have passed into the realm of history in Europe and in the United States, but in Russia it remains very much alive, part of the country’s everyday consciousness. For that reason, the annual celebration of Victory Day is unavoidably political: the defeat of Fascism, nearly seventy years ago, provides an unassailable justification for whatever the Russian state does today.

This year’s festivities will to be especially resonant. Vladimir Putin plans to visit Sevastopol, a port city on the Crimean peninsula that was the site of a decisive battle in the Second World War. Earlier this year, when Russian troops and pro-Russian militias seized control of Crimea, they claimed to be protecting the territory from Fascists, drawing a straight line from the villains of the Second World War to the new government in Kiev. Putin’s Victory Day visit is meant to underline the historical connection. In his narrative—which has been widely embraced in Russia—the justice of Crimea’s return to Russia is intimately connected to the wartime heroism displayed there seven decades earlier.

For many years, May 9th was celebrated with equal fervor in Ukraine and in Russia, but that unifying spirit will certainly be lacking this year. There will likely be clashes across south and east Ukraine, with pro-Russian and pro-Maidan forces battling to claim the legacy of the Second World War and the legitimacy that comes with the inheritance of the victory over Fascism. Many old grievances—such as the fact that some western Ukrainians supported the Nazis—will be aired once again during the Victory Day celebrations.

The government in Kiev has already announced that they will replace the traditional avatar of wartime remembrance in Russia, the orange-and-black Saint George’s Ribbon, with a red-and-black poppy, like those associated with Remembrance Day in Western Europe. Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defense Minister, seized the opportunity, announcing the details of the annual military parade on Red Square, to declare “The most important political significance” of the holiday. “We must again demonstrate to the world Russia’s categorical rejection of Fascism,” he said.

The first victory parade was held in June, 1945, just weeks after Soviet troops captured Berlin. Soldiers representing every front in the war marched across Red Square, led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who rode a white horse. Joseph Stalin watched the proceedings from atop Lenin’s mausoleum. The next year, however, Stalin downgraded May 9th to a regular work day, with no celebrations or parades. This was, in part, because he was wary of the threat of returned military heroes—he knew the history of the Decembrists, the Tsarist officers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars and launched a failed revolution after coming home. But perhaps even more important was the fact that much of the country was still in ruins, and its people were in no mood to celebrate the war.

It wasn’t until the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet victory, in 1965, that Leonid Brezhnev reinstated May 9th as a state holiday, replete with a military parade across Red Square. His immediate aims were to solidify his own rule atop the Politburo—he had risen to the post of general secretary in 1964—and to move Soviet society away from the “thaw,” a period of relative openness under his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev. According to Lev Gudkov, a sociologist and the director of the Levada Center, a polling and research organization in Moscow, Brezhnev introduced a “pompous and ceremonial” official history of the war, as an “affirmation of nationalist values,” in which the state was all powerful and victory was “presented as the realization of a single plan of the Communist Party.”

By bringing the commemoration of victory, and the memory of the war, under the authority of the state, the Soviet leadership could reassert its control over how that history would be told. Under Khrushchev, a genre of war literature known as “lieutenants’ prose”—written by authors who had been mid-level soldiers—had flourished, offering a ground-level view of battle that could be ugly and raw. Writers like Viktor Nekrasov and Emmanuil Kazakevich depicted the war as a private experience, full of violence and misery, and they did not always portray top Soviet military officials in a favorable light. Brezhnev sought to recapture the wartime experience for the state, with histories in which generals and Party leaders wisely stewarded the country through crises. Around this time, the first memoirs of top wartime figures, including Zhukov, were released, and films emphasized Soviet bravery while downplaying the horror and the suffering of the German invasion.

By the mid-nineteen-sixties, the Soviet state was no longer promising its citizens a utopian Communist future. Under Brezhnev, the state “stopped working on a vision of the future and, instead, focussed on the past,” the cultural historian Boris Dubin told me. The memory of the war, with Victory Day as its triumphant and unchanging centerpiece, became the basis for an official mythology that heralded a new type of “Soviet man.” This collective identity—and the bond between the state and its loyal subjects—was grounded in the story of shared victory. Unlike in previous generations, Dubin said, the state “didn’t demand heroic feats from its citizens; it didn’t require their mobilization.” Instead the system demanded only “adaptation to their current circumstances—this is how it will be forever.” Victory Day would therefore serve as a yearly reminder of the timelessness and incontestable virtue of the Soviet system.

As time passed, and lived memories of the war became more rare, May 9th became less a celebration of those who fought and more a hymn to the power and greatness of the Soviet Union. During a time of cynicism about Communist ideology, when there was little passion for Marxist-Leninist philosophy, the state increasingly justified its authority and its merit by referencing the victory over Nazism. For Russians, then, as now, the defeat of Hitler’s army, and the astonishing human cost that it entailed, represented “a spiritual achievement,” said Vladimir Afanasev, a senior historian at the Central Armed Forces Museum, in Moscow. It is not exactly religious, but there is something almost holy, and certainly quite solemn, in the way the country marks Victory Day. For Russians, Afanasev said, the horrors of the war were “like the suffering of Christ: you had an entire people go through a colossal test, a colossal suffering.”

The appeal of Victory Day for Putin, who has lamented the country’s “dire lack of spiritual ties,” is obvious. Like his predecessors in the Kremlin, Putin understands that the unifying experience of the war is one of the nation’s few uncontested achievements. (Another such achievement, the exploration of space, is far less symbolic and powerful.) Under Putin, the military parade on May 9th has become a stylized and well-produced affair, overseen by Konstantin Ernst, the director of Russia’s largest state-controlled television network, Channel One. Putin’s version of Victory Day, Dubin has written, combines “the symbols of a great power and Orthodoxy” with “the techniques of Hollywood poetics and pyrotechnics.”

As the celebration of May 9th has become more grandiose, the freedom to discuss the history of the war has been more tightly restricted. The memory of the war is too important—and too powerful—to be left uncontrolled. Earlier this week, Putin signed a new law that criminalizes “rehabilitation of Nazism,” which includes spreading “false information” about the conduct of Soviet forces during the war, thereby squelching any conversation about atrocities committed by the Red Army during its march across Europe.

Though Putin has relied on the historical memory of the war to underlie the state’s power, and, by extension, his own, the triumph was never his. With Russia’s annexation of Crimea, however, Putin has a victory that belongs to him. He no longer has to lean on the memory of a heroic achievement from decades ago—now there is a new success to match the old, and, better yet, they are inexorably linked, two points on the same chain of historical destiny. The Russian people, at least for now, appear to be grateful: Putin’s approval rating is above eighty per cent, and just three per cent say that they disapprove of Crimea joining Russia. In contrast to the sanctified suffering of Second World War, the retaking of Crimea required no sacrifice from the Russian people. But eastern Ukraine is sinking into violence and chaos, and Putin may find it a far more difficult situation to control. He will surely enjoy his victory celebration in Sevastopol, but, as the costs of his westward adventure mount, the history of May 9th should be a reminder that future triumphs will not come so easily.

Update:

On Friday morning, Putin presided over the Victory Day military parade through Red Square, which included divisions from Crimea. “This is the holiday when the invincible power of patriotism triumphs,” Putin said, in a brief speech before the parade. “When all of us particularly feel what it means to be faithful to the Motherland and how important it is to defend its interests.”

After the ceremony in Moscow, Putin flew directly to Sevastopol—his first visit to Crimea since Russia claimed the territory. In Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists paid tribute to Stalin and likened the Soviet fight against fascism to their struggle against the new government in Kiev. And in the southeastern coastal city of Mariupol, where separatists have occupied a police headquarters that government troops attempted to retake, fighting on Friday left at least eight dead.

Photograph: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency/Getty.

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